One interesting American thing (a technical term, meaning a moment or event, a text, a controversy, an idea, a figure, or whatevertheheckelse I think of) per day, from Ben Railton, a professor of American literature, culture, history, and, natch, Studies.

MyAmericanFuture

MyAmericanFuture

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

[Last week, I
had the chance to attend a national meeting of the Scholars Strategy Network, a
vital public scholarly organization of which I’ve been a
Member for almost four years. So this week I wanted to share a few sides to
my work with SSN, leading up to a weekend post on that national meeting and
SSN’s expanding role in Trump’s America!]

On two
SSN-inspired posts that extended beyond their online starting points.

In October 2015,
SSN
Member Lawrence Jacobs and others at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs
hosted two Washington,
DC events to celebrate and discuss former Vice President Walter Mondale’s “life
and legacy.” Jacobs and Avi Green asked me if I would write a tie-in piece on
that theme for my biweekly Talking Points Memo column, and the result was “Why It’s Time to
Reassess Walter Mondale’s Place in History.” Although the piece didn’t
receive a ton of views, I was nonetheless proud of how it turned out, and prouder
still of two unexpected follow-ups: Minnesota
Senator Amy Klobuchar, who was taking part in the DC events, Tweeted a link
to the piece; and, most inspiringly of all, Jacobs wrote me that he had had the
chance to share the piece with Mondale himself, who “appreciated the thoughtful
analysis.” I share that latter detail not to brag (I mean, well, not only to brag), but to highlight instead
how, thanks in no small measure to SSN’s connections and community, such online
pieces can have significant offline stakes and meanings, can quite literally
reach audiences we might never have expected.

The following
spring, Jacobs and his fellow political
scientist Desmond King published a controversial and important book, Fed
Power: How Finance Wins (Oxford University Press, 2016), an argument
that the Federal Reserve has gone far beyond its Progressive Era origins to
become a far-too independent and powerful part of our federal government and
society. Thanks once again to my SSN connection to Jacobs, and specifically to
a request from SSN Director of
Communications Shira Rascoe for tie-in pieces to accompany the book’s April
2016 publication, I wrote a
review of the book for my (at the time) new gig with the Huffington Post; I hope and believe that
the review was even-handed, accurate, and fair despite those professional and
personal connections. In any case, and in a reflection of how online writing
has become just as much a part of our social and cultural conversations as more
traditional print media, quotes from my review became part of the reviews
section of the book’s Amazon page, alongside quotes from a newspaper (The Financial Times) and a magazine (The American Prospect). It’s easy to
think of an online, blog post book review as fundamentally distinct from a
print publication one—but as the Amazon use illustrates, they’re at least part
of the same spectrum, if not indeed overtly parallel.

That would be
one main takeaway of mine from these two examples and experiences—that online
writing, thanks in no small measure to its immediacy and accessibility, has the
chance to extend to and connect with audiences and conversations well beyond
its particular starting point or location (and often entirely outside of the plans
or imagining of its author, which is mostly a good but occasionally a
frustrating and even frightening thing; I’m referring in particular to the
consistently vile and at times threatening comments on that post). But at the
same time, both these specific examples and SSN’s work overall also illustrate
the role that connections and community play in advancing and deepening such
extensions of any individual’s writing and voice. I used to feel that “who you
know” was a less than ideal side to this or any profession; but have to come to
believe that there’s nothing wrong with, and a great deal that’s inspiring
about, being part of communities that can help us share what we have to say
with as many audiences and in as many settings as possible. Our words and works
will be there in any case; we might as well be part of networks that can help
get them viewed, engaged with, and responded to by as many readers as we can.
Including, y’know, former Vice Presidents.

Next SSN post
tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on SSN, or other organizations or efforts you’d highlight?

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